Your Mail: Courthouse needs help

The situation regarding handicapped accessibility at the Beauregard Parish Courthouse has reached a new level with me.

Recently, a friend and fellow officer suffered a life-threatening pulmonary attack while testifying in the upstairs courtroom. In the agonizing minutes before the ambulance arrived, those present who were trying to do what we could for our friend who could not breathe all seemed to arrive at the same question at the same time: How are we going to get him down to the ambulance? The lift is "still" out and the stairways and doorways are too narrow for a gurney.

The ambulance crew, thankfully, brought a safety chair that could be used to move our friend from the back area to the stairwell leading to the ambulance. While in the chair, he then had to be carried down three flights of stairs, with the risk of him falling.

Thankfully, our friend will recover. But this episode brought home to me the fact that whatever is being done to get the courthouse in shape needs to move along quickly before something really bad happens and we all end up paying the price -- either from the situation being the cause of someone losing a loved one, or from us being the center of some form of litigation.

I am not privy to the process that is involved with this, but if it takes just everyone chipping in together or approving a slight tax increase, we need to do it or vote for it.

Joe Toler

Beauregard Parish

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Your Mail: Courthouse needs help

The situation regarding handicapped accessibility at the Beauregard Parish Courthouse has reached a new level with me.Recently, a friend and fellow officer suffered a life-threatening pulmonary